I have to blog now, before I find a reason to put off writing one more day. I have spent a couple of weeks wrapped up in The Tender Bar, a memoir by J.R. Moehringer. Well, that and the readings for my classes....but those are not yet capturing my imagination. Moehringer, or "M," as I will call him here, is a master storyteller. His memoir gave me all kinds of juicy bits for my paper. He was obsessed with the idea of how to become a man. growing up without a father, he turned to the many men around him who were primarily those associated with a local bar at which his uncle bartended. He tried to learn form these men, and I suppose he did, but he ends his book concluding that his mother held the characteristics he had always associated with manhood, and was a better "man" than any "real" men he had known. I found this same observation in Datcher's book. Yet, these men still yearn for their fathers. They are still heartbroken over the lack of men in their lives. It breaks my heart to read about their raw need for their fathers' love and their constant sense of inadequacy because they do not feel they can achieve manhood without some symbolic fatherly act to bestow it upon them.